On the other hand, this is Paul Auster we're talking about, a writer who runs rings around his peers without breaking a sweat. At a time when fiction writers have become trained professionals, with their own academic programs and quasi-industrial production methods, Auster stands out as a sort of anachronism: the renaissance writer. Renaissance, that is, in that while he is best known for his novels, he is also a well-regarded translator of French poetry, a skilled poet, essayist, screenwriter and an editor — his most recent work, "I Thought My Father Was God," is a collection of interviews he edited for National Public Radio's "National Story Project." The previous generation has Updike and Mailer, but at least in the United States it's getting harder to find novelists who can do much outside of prose fiction.

While Auster does have his supporters, his skills as a writer have yet to earn him wide-ranging acclaim. Stateside, that is — not surprisingly, Auster is immensely popular in France, perhaps the most popular American writer. An Iowa-born friend of mine living in Paris once asked what I thought of Paul Austair; when I noted his pronunciation, he replied, "Well, I've never discussed him in English before."

There is a host of possible reasons for Auster's relative domestic obscurity, one likely candidate being his paranoid, claustrophobic style, one too nihilistic for Americans raised on stories of success or, at most, tragic failure. His characters have a penchant for self-destruction, locking themselves in rooms, drinking themselves to near-death or disappearing completely. And his narrative technique often parallels his characters — deeply introspective, Auster will spend a dozen pages explaining the plot of a film, or the history behind a book the narrator happens to be reading. Everything in an Auster novel borders on obsessive madness.

That said, "The Book of Illusions" might just represent a softening of Auster's dark, rough edges; the characters, while still idiosyncratically sad, are crafted with a human touch absent in his previous works. Auster has an odd gift for creating well-rounded characters with whom we can empathize, but who find it difficult, if not impossible, to empathize with those around them.

David Zimmer, the narrator of "The Book of Illusions," comes the closest of any Auster protagonist to breaking that mold. Zimmer is a lapsed academic who becomes obsessed with the works of Hector Mann, a silent film actor and director, as a coping mechanism after the death of his wife and son. Mann — an Auster creation — made only 12 films before disappearing in the late 1920s, and at one point Zimmer flies around the world hunting down rare copies of each one. This sort of bizarre obsession is vintage Auster, and after the first 50 pages the book seems less a novel in its own right than a not-so-subtle rehashing of "The City of Glass" in "The New York Trilogy."

Zimmer, like many of Auster's characters, becomes so engrossed in his own world that he quickly loses all connection with the one outside, drinking heavily and isolating himself from friends. When he finishes with Mann, he retreats to a cabin in the Vermont woods and begins to translate Chateaubriand's massive "Memoirs of a Dead Man," mostly as an excuse to avoid human contact.

But his world is shaken when he receives a letter from a woman claiming to be Hector Mann's wife, telling him that Mann is alive and inviting Zimmer to visit the now-ancient actor at his New Mexico ranch. Already wary of human contact, Zimmer refuses. But soon a mysterious woman named Alma Grund shows up one rainy night saying she is Mann's biographer and that Mann is dying. He decides to visit Mann after all.

What follows is a long digression into the life of Hector Mann: how he came to the States from Argentina, rose to the height of the Hollywood film industry and then, following the accidental death of a paramour, went into hiding. Mann drifted through the Northwest, to Chicago and finally New Mexico, where he set up his own private film studio. He has ordered all copies of his films destroyed after his death, which is another reason Zimmer must hurry to New Mexico.

Zimmer's trip — and in particular his budding romance with Alma — is the means by which he regains his humanity; by the end of the book he is remarried, writing and living in Brooklyn, a happy ending very untypical of Auster. Of course, it would be unthinkable for the author to surrender completely to "happily ever after"; so much is sacrificed during the last 50 pages or so — Mann's work, Alma's biography, even Alma herself — because, at least in Auster's world, personal happiness always comes at a high price.

"The Book of Illusions" is more balanced than many of Auster's previous works, although because of that it is incomplete at times. Auster is a great storyteller, but he's never been one for dialogue, and "The Book of Illusions" suffers for it. There is a lot of talking, and too much of that talking is stilted and awkward; how many adults say "you make me want to puke"? Nevertheless, the dialogue is necessary to establish the relationships that Zimmer's path back into life requires, and without a good ear for the way people actually speak, Auster comes up short.

But while "The Book of Illusions" is flawed, it also uncovers new territory for Auster, a good sign from a writer who could easily coast through the rest of his career treading his well-defined stylistic grounds. And given his new direction, there's a good chance that, even if his fans across the Atlantic don't applaud his choice, he might pick up some new ones back home.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)